Absolute Genius with Dick & Dom - Netflix

Dick & Dom present a show in which they learn about some of the greatest
geniuses of our time.

Type: Documentary

Languages: English

Status: To Be Determined

Runtime: 30 minutes

Premier: 2013-01-27

Absolute Genius with Dick & Dom - Alan Turing - Netflix

Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English
computer scientist, mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher,
and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the
development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation
of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine,
which can be considered a model of a general purpose computer. Turing is
widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and
artificial intelligence. During the Second World War, Turing worked for
the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park,
Britain's codebreaking centre that produced Ultra intelligence. For a
time he led Hut 8, the section which was responsible for German naval
cryptanalysis. Here he devised a number of techniques for speeding the
breaking of German ciphers, including improvements to the pre-war Polish
bombe method, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for
the Enigma machine. Turing played a pivotal role in cracking intercepted
coded messages that enabled the Allies to defeat the Nazis in many
crucial engagements, including the Battle of the Atlantic, and in so
doing helped win the war. Counterfactual history is difficult with
respect to the effect Ultra intelligence had on the length of the war,
but at the upper end it has been estimated that this work shortened the
war in Europe by more than two years and saved over fourteen million
lives. After the war, Turing worked at the National Physical Laboratory,
where he designed the ACE, among the first designs for a stored-program
computer. In 1948 Turing joined Max Newman's Computing Machine
Laboratory at the Victoria University of Manchester, where he helped
develop the Manchester computers and became interested in mathematical
biology. He wrote a paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis, and
predicted oscillating chemical reactions such as the
Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, first observed in the 1960s. Turing was
prosecuted in 1952 for homosexual acts, when by the Labouchere
Amendment, “gross indecency” was a criminal offence in the UK. He
accepted chemical castration treatment, with DES, as an alternative to
prison. Turing died in 1954, 16 days before his 42nd birthday, from
cyanide poisoning. An inquest determined his death as suicide, but it
has been noted that the known evidence is also consistent with
accidental poisoning. In 2009, following an Internet campaign, British
Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of
the British government for “the appalling way he was treated.” Queen
Elizabeth II granted him a posthumous pardon in 2013. The Alan Turing
law is now an informal term for a 2017 law in the United Kingdom that
retroactively pardoned men cautioned or convicted under historical
legislation that outlawed homosexual acts.